In the world of websites we use the words ‘obfuscate’ and ‘obfuscation’ when talking about protecting important information such as email addresses and telephone numbers from malicious web bots.
Literally it means to make something obscure or difficult to understand.
2) Why is obfuscation important?
Email addresses are very valuable things and some people will go to great lengths to obtain them. One method is using malicious web bots to travel around the internet scraping email addresses from websites.
Once collected these email addresses may be sold in the form of lists to unscrupulous marketers or even worse be used by criminal spamming operations.
By obfuscating important information on your website it can no longer be collected in this way. An obfuscated email address will still display perfectly normally on the page, but at a code level it has been encrypted, making it very difficult for web bots to read.
3) How do you pronounce obfuscation?
Ah yes, probably the most important question of all!
Ob – fuss – kay – shun